My name is Sivad Haderach, #915.
If you would like to know how the world ended, follow along.
If you would like to know how the world ended, follow along.
December 31, 2011
December 23, 2011
Rise
The Shadow rose to meet me, on this fateful day. I could feel it calling. Seething.
It was revealed the day that our race proved it cared more about individual self interest than the collective good. What happened to this planet? Why did we fail as stewards?
Everyone says, “not my fault.”
“Not my problem.”
My hand trembles with spasms of rage. How arrogant. My breath quickens. How stupid.
I could end it all. I really could. Not many people can say that. But the Shadow stares back at me. Wonder. Could I do it? Could I end this all, for all the world to see?
Shadow says yes. Shadow says I already have.
My finger is on the trigger. I could blight all of mankind. Nano-viruses have nothing on what I’ve concocted.
But something stays my hand. Vague recollections, like something from a half-remembered dream.
My pulse quickens at the thought of becoming Death. Let the Shadow win.
But still I waver. Hand over the trigger. I am the most important person alive right now.
A voice echoes in my head: “Rise.”
I obey.
“Rise.”
I look across the desolate fields. The cracked plates. The dried oceans.
“Rise.”
I see him clearly, in my mind’s eye. I know what he will be called. The name by which legend shall remember him. He is protean, shifting. At once an enigma, an androgyn, and the utter image of lionized masculinity.
Adamah v’ah Mith’ra.
Why do I know this name?
Who could not.
“Rise,” he says again.
And he knows my name. As I know his.
He is The Last Sleeper.
And I am his instrument.
December 17, 2011
November 8, 2011
Memory
When the world shrieked, it sank its talons into my heart.
I can still hear their cries. The rebuilding effort goes slowly. My effort even slower. I’m working at full speed now, but there are moments of extreme lethargy. Paralysis. An unwillingness, by my subconscious, to deal with what I’ve experienced. The ultimate betrayal, because it was my own betrayal as well as the betrayal of billions of others.
We built this world. And now we’ve left it behind. I look out at the ocean from the hotel in Sydney and don’t see anything. Just a vast desert. It has left us behind, the spirit of the place. The spirit is gone. And now we are making up for all of our crimes.
Recycle. Sustainability. Earth Day. What cheap parlor tricks they seem in the wake of our gross miscalculation. They wouldn’t have done anything. It’s impossible to make this world better when we, ourselves, are so dark. The bitter hearts of men were on full display in the years before, the year during, and now after the Quake.
Solace can be found in one fact, and one fact alone. That we might escape the hell we made for ourselves. But then the wars will have to cease, governments will have to play nice, and people have to stop killing each other. There’s only so much food left.
In my hands, right now, there is the power to perhaps right it all. Do I end this misery for all the world to see?
Or do I take everybody else down with me.
October 26, 2011
Debris
This poor, broken world. I think what is happening has made us all just the slightest bit mad. Maybe we were not ready for Collapse. We should have built our walls just a bit higher, our defenses a little stronger.
If we had done that, would it have made a difference? I believe it would have. I don’t think humanity was fortified against something so violent. It’s like an infant separated from the mother…what do you expect to happen? We thought our lives were perfect, we thought we had built heaven on Earth.
Oh, Earth. What have we done? What will we do? We only had one of these. I don’t remember the last quake in any amount of clarity, but I do know that it won’t be the last. The Earth is tearing itself apart now. The internet comes on and off, twitching like a spider on its back. With no connection and no hope, we’re locked into our regional zones.
But I had a dream last night. A dove flew over the debris of a city I could not recognize. The dove had a piece of paper tightly clutched in its talons, and let it fall to the wreckage below. I caught the paper and opened it…
Cannot for the life of me remember what it said. It’s on the tip of my mind, the tip of my brain…it could be insignificant but right now I feel it might be everything. What the hell was it?
I’ve been back to work. The internet’s spotty but the computers work fine. I was able to call up a lot of my saved research - that I started after the first quake. It’s very curious, to see what I thought by intuition then, and what I know by fact now. Like the rotation hypothesis. I knew then that our only hope would be the Moon. And it still is! Imagine that. We’re drifting farther from the Sun, but something is keeping the Moon in check.
If I can get any time on the telescope I’ll be sure to make some more notes. It seems barbaric, but the only hope has got to be the Moon, right? Right?
Diana thinks I’m crazy. She says no one will go for it, that even if I could prove it to the Committee, there’s no way the UN would approve such an operation. It would take a crazy person to achieve the impossible. When I tell her I think I’m going crazy, she laughs at me. She has a knack for sifting through the debris of my shattered emotions and making me feel very small.
I’ve just remembered what the message the dove carried said:
You’ve already done it. All you need is courage.
October 23, 2011
The Earthquake, PT I
Aurelia says it’s good to write down what I remember. That it will help everything come back. So, I’m going to split up my journal entries specific to this topic in hopes that it will return.
I don’t remember what I was doing when it hit. All I remember is the panic, the ringing in my ears…
And the fear. Fear to lose so much. I had always thought I was invincible to death, that somehow as much as my colleagues might talk about it…it did not apply to me. Perhaps that is my inability to recognize exactly what is going on. My foolish, childish hope…
But with the last quake - and I’ve been feeling this with each successive one - I’m beginning to sway to the side of the cynics. It was when I buried my mother last night that I accepted fate for the first time.
We are all going to die.
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